Terence Emmons – Författare

This books is concerned with the emancipation of the Russian serfs in 1861, the most important event in Russian history between the reign of Peter the Great (1682-1725) and the Revolution of 1905. It is a social history of the emancipation. The attitudes of the landowning gentry toward emancipation: their part in its preparation and their conflict with the government over the terms of emancipation and related reforms, are the major subjects treated. The book shows in what circumstances the emancipation took place, and how the gentry were involved in the process. The undertaking of emancipation produced a political and social crisis which involved a serious threat to the autocratic regime, laid the foundations for the rise of constitutional liberalism in Russia, but destroyed the foundations of the gentry class.

The essays in this 1982 volume result from a conference held at Stanford University in 1978, assembled to assess the overall character and significance of the prerevolutionary Russian experiment with the principle and practice of local self-government, the zemstvo, over half of its existence, 1864-1918. The unifying theme of the collection is the rejection of the liberal myth of the zemstvo as an instrument of social integration. The chapters focus on the substantive elements of conflict and tension that existed within the zemstvos, especially between the institutions' two principal groups: the landed gentry, who dominated the zemstvo, and the peasants, who constituted the majority of the population and were intended to the beneficiaries of most of the economic and cultural programs, yet had little part in their formation. Based on the contributors' extensive knowledge of their respective subjects, many of them provide information from previously unpublished materials in Soviet and American archives.

This book deals with a sequence of lively and often bizarre episodes within San Francisco's Russian community set in motion in early 1888 by the arrival in San Francisco of a new Russian Orthodox bishop-and his entourage, which included some twenty clergymen and eleven boys. It did not take long for the bishop to clash with Dr. Nicholas Russel, a colorful Russian revolutionary exile who was one of the leaders of the Russian community. They became bitter enemies, and Bishop Vladimir's three-and-a-half-year tenure in San Francisco was punctuated by a series of remarkable scandals and lawsuits, by an excommunication, by an unconsummated duel, and by a host of lurid allegations that received extensive local publicity-including charges of arson, perjury, attempts to hire potential assassins, bigamy, and, most sensationally, sodomy and child abuse. All of this centered around the combative bishop and his church administration, and eventually involved, in one way or another, a large part of San Francisco's Russian community, as people took sides with either the bishop or his tireless antagonist, Dr. Russel. These local furors reverberated in high places in St.Petersburg, as the procurator-general of the Holy Synod and officials of the Russian autocracy sought, in vain for the most part, to curb the bishop and bring peace to the local community. This vivid example of "microhistory" sheds light on a number of intriguing issues, notably the workings of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia, the nature of European ethnic communities in late-nineteenth-century America, the mentality of the two protagonists (who represented widely different Russian social groups), Russian church-state relations, and nineteenth-century legal and sexual mores.